The Monster Anglopolis: The English Language in India
by Sunandan Roy Chowdhury
Published in Planet 216
Sunandan Roy Chowdhury decries the dominance of the English language over Indian culture, thought, identity and material development.
The waters of the Arabian Sea wash the walls of Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts – India’s premier venue for theatre and performances, located in posh downtown Bombay, as Mumbai was known in the days of British Raj and in the early decades of independent India. It is mid November and I am there with a writer friend from Slovenia to attend the Mumbai Literature Festival. The festival has brought together an impressive show of writers from India and abroad. As I walk around the designer campus of the NCPA, I notice theatre posters, about a dozen of them, announcing forthcoming shows – the shows and their posters, all in English. This, in a city where people speak more than a dozen languages and which has strong modern tradition of theatre, at least in Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi. However, Mumbai almost never hosts theatre in a language other than in English. Click Here for the Whole Article

Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.